Talmud

Over the past fifty years, archaeological excavations in Israel have unearthed about half a dozen ancient synagogues that were in use at different points in time between the first century BCE through the outbreak of the Bar-Kochba rebellion early in the second century of the Common Era.  In close proximity to each of these synagogues, a mikveh (ritual bath) has been discovered.  In contrast, no mikvaot have been discovered adjacent to any of the dozens of later synagogues that have been excavated and studied, with only one or two possible exceptions. 
At this point it is impossible to determine exactly when mikvaot ceased to be built in connection with synagogues, as the archaeological record reports very little about synagogues of the late second - early third century CE.  From an archaeological perspective, it is clear that at least from the second half of the third century, synagogues began to be built without regard for proximity to mikvaot.
Talmudic sources make no mention of a requirement to build mikvaot adjacent to synagogues. To date, no satisfactory explanation has been given for the evident connection between the synagogue and the mikveh in the early period, and the disappearance of such a connection in later periods of synagogue history. The objective of this paper is to present and explore a possible interpretation of this puzzling phenomenon.
  During the Second Temple and Mishnaic Periods, a rabbinical enactment was in effect requiring mikveh ablutions prior to engagement in Torah study and prayer for individuals who had experienced seminal emission. Careful study of the Talmudic sources reveals that this enactment was nullified early in the Amoraic Period, sometime during the second quarter of the third century CE.
It would appear that the mikvaot built adjacent to the earlier synagogues were intended for this precise function, serving visitors to the synagogue who required ritual ablutions prior to Torah study and prayer.  Once the rabbinical enactment regarding these ablutions was nullified, there was no longer need for such mikvaot, and hence the absence of mikvaot in proximity to the later synagogues.

I trace the religious significance of rain in Tractate Taanit, a 6th century volume of the Babylonian Talmud that addresses fasts in response to drought among rabbinic Jewish communities in late antiquity.  Tractate Taanit incorporates rain symbolism into key rabbinic conceptions of Torah, revelation, and divine compassion.  As the tractate crafts rain into a symbol that expresses God’s presence and relationship with Israel, it also articulates drought as the essential expression of divine absence.  Within the tractate, fasting serves as the quintessential collective response to the physical and spiritual crisis of drought.  Fasting practice in Tractate Taʿanit fashions the vulnerable collective body into an instrument particularly suited to cry out for divine answer.  By invoking and intensifying the experience of suffering caused by drought, the community uses its communal body to align itself with both a suffering God and a suffering earth, each of which yearn for reconciliation.

People abused by angry discipline as children, may tend to abuse or overly punish other people or themselves for perceived wrongs in their adult life. In some individuals, aggressive personality traits may be genetically inherited. The aggressive personality may feel weakened by having guidelines or boundaries for anger. Anger is a normal human emotion, and these guidelines can help express anger in a healthy way.

This article attempts to advance a number of claims concerning the Zohar’s exegetical presentation of the biblical story of the blasphemer (Lev. 24: 10-23). The major thesis of the article is that the Zoharic interpretation contains a hidden anti-Christian polemic—one aimed directly at the figures of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. To prove this, the article shows that the Zohar’s language concerning the blasphemer recalls tropes and structures from the popular medieval polemical work, Toledot Yeshu.
The article provides a significant understanding of the ambivalent Zoharic attitude towards Jesus as the Son of God – and of the Virgin Mary as linked to the Shekhinah.

This article was previously published in my Ph.D. dissertation in 2012 (Hebrew).

Rabbi Yitshak Hutner (1906-1980) was a remarkable scholar, an enigmatic religious intellectual and a charismatic teacher. Drawing upon his public discourses and his written letters, I argue that Hutner's vocabulary-which remained rooted almost entirely in the vocabulary of traditional Talmudism-afforded him a ready garment in which to clothe a syncretic educational theory, which combines Hasidic approaches to spiritual instruction and remakes the traditions of Lithuanian piety and study for his new American audience. The present study interrogates a series of key themes that appear in Hutner's teachings, all of which pertain to issues of pedagogy and the construction of religious education. The essay advances a historical argument by examining the works of an important and influential modern Jewish thinker, but it is also driven by a constructive question: What does Hutner's vision of Jewish religious teaching and learning have to contribute to today's Jewish education, and to the broader world of higher education in North America in particular?

Ayalon Eidelstein’s Openness and Faith focuses on the centrality of the idea of openness, or open-mindedness, to the educational sphere. The first half presents the challenges in modern ‘divided-consciousness’ and its consequences of egoism, materialism, and hedonism on the one hand, and religious fanatism on the other. Eidelstein’s main audience is the Israeli secular public, to which he proposes an educational and philosophical middle-way rooted in sincere human and inter-human openness. This openness is inspired by the idea of disinterestedness that Kant articulates in his Critique of Judgment. Eidelstein refers to additional authors, including Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas, to conceptualize the idea of open-mindedness. In the second half of the book, he engages classical American Pragmatism, specifically that of William James, in order to establish the possibility for, and the validity of, a humane open-mindedness. Pragmatism thus paves the way for accepting beliefs that may otherwise be excluded as superstitions and accords them a legitimate and productive role in the life of a modern individual.
The difficulty, however, lies in Eidelstein’s employment of Kantian disinterestedness, for it is in fact seriously dissonant with the worthy pragmatic educational purposes that Eidelstein elaborates in the second half of his book. Pragmatism is opposed to disinterestedness in that it stresses the entanglement of fact and value, viewing interests as playing a necessary and productive part in moral motivation and action, while Kantian deontology eliminates consequentialism from the moral scope. While for pragmatists (for example John Dewey’s Democracy and Education) the human creature is holistically conceived, as made of flesh and blood and not only as ‘spirit’, Kant maintained the dualistic Cartesian tradition.
This tension calls for a rigorous address. Since Eidelstein’s book is making an important claim about the place open-mindedness has within the Judaism, it must be noted that the disinterestedness of a presumed human ‘self’ is also not easily compatible with the dominant voices in normative Jewish tradition. The Bible does not deal to a large extent with the ‘self’ or with mental intentions, and its conception of the human is not categorically different in the Talmudic corpus. On the contrary, the rabbis frequently endorse pragmatic and ‘external’ reasons, as the motivational basis for action. The kind of purism associated with disinterestedness (as in Mishnah Avot 5:18-19) is barely represented in rabbinic thought.
Openness and Faith: In Search of Cultural Education Here and Now is nevertheless an important contribution to the intellectual discourse over the individual and public virtues. In our ever-more segregated and fenced-off world, there is an urgency to delineating the virtue of openness, hoping that Ecclesiastes is right in contending that “No person has power over the spirit [רוח] to retain it” (8:8). But to make Eidelstein’s point about openness in the second half of his book educationally viable, there a need for a pragmatic refinement of the philosophical anthropology in its first half. One way or the other, Openness and Faith is praiseworthy for its articulateness and depth, which invites its readers to an open-minded conversation about the concept of openness.

בעולם של משחקים אינטראקטיבים קיימת אתגר.  כיצד לאפשר לשחקן חופש פעולה ובו זמנית לערוך חוויה רציפה ושלימה (קוהורנטי)?

אני רואה בגמרא מערך מדהים, שבו קיימת כוונה של המחבר ובכל זאת קיימת חופש פעולה של הלומד (ונראה לי שהתורה שבכתב היא האב טיפוס למבנה דומה של הגמרא).

Logic in the Talmud is a ‘thematic compilation’. It collects in one volume essays that he has written on this subject in Judaic Logic (1995) and A Fortiori Logic (2013), in which traces of logic in the Talmud (the Mishna and Gemara) are identified and analyzed. While this book does not constitute an exhaustive study of logic in the Talmud, it is a ground-breaking and extensive study.

This article traces the narrative source of Avinu Malkenu (Our Father, Our King) through two stories in the Babylonian Talmud, and one in the Jerusalem Talmud. By examining these stories, we can gain clarity on the purpose of this prayer and it relationship to the leader.

This paper offers a critical analysis of Rabbinic sources concerning the the history of Loshon HaQodesh. The paper first attempts to define the language known as "Loshon HaQodesh" and then trace its origins through Midrashic and Talmudic sources. The paper also follows the rise and decline of this language.
A more complete version of this paper was printed in Nov. 2014 under the name Lashon HaKodesh: History, Holiness, & Hebrew (Mosaica Press, 2014).

Im Folgenden wird der Hauptwortschatz des hebräischen Alten Testaments (TANACH) und aus der Mischna alle Traktate der 1. Ordnung (Berakhoth, Pea, Demai, Kilayim, Scheebi‘it, Trumot, Ma‘aserot, Ma‘aserot Scheni, Challah, Orla und Bikkurim), der 2. Ordnung (Schabbat, Eruwim, Pesachim, Schekalim, Joma, Sukka, Jom Tow, Rosch Haschana, Ta‘anijot, Megilla, Mo‘ed Katan und Chagiga) sowie der 3. Ordnung (Jebamot, Ketubot, Nedarim, Nasir, Sota, Gittin und Qiddu-schim) grundsätzlich vorausgesetzt. Meine Wortschatz-Dateien dazu findet man unter folgendem Link: https://sthbasel.academia.edu/JacobThiessen/Drafts. Man beachte die Einführung mit vielen Link in den Dateien zur Mosestora, zum Matthäusevangelium, zum Römerbrief und zu den zwei Korintherbriefen sowie in dem alphabetischen Verzeichnis zum TANACH.
Die Verben ohne Punktierung beziehen sich grundsätzlich auf den TANACH-Wortschatz, während die Verben mit Punktierung den neuhebräischen Gebrauch darstellen.
Ich weise darauf hin, dass ich kein Philologe, sondern Exeget (Neutestamentler) bin. Das ist beim Gebrauch dieser Unterlagen zu beachten. Gleichwohl werden Experten und andere durch diese Un-terlagen zu sehr spannenden philologischen Erkenntnissen gelangen.

This essay was written in response to a prompt question posed by the editors of an anniversary edition of the Sixteenth Century Journal: "How have present political issues affected the way you do research?" In arguing that what once afforded study of the "Northern Renaissance" its pride of place in art historical scholarship was the central role played by acts of iconoclasm surrounding the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing responses in the formulations of new kinds of works of art, this essay then claims that the urgency of the present moment is to call attention to other instances of trauma, where violences may not have produced as much speech. A drawing by Christoph Jamnitzer and prints by Albrecht Dürer are here used to locate representations of the scream--and representations of the suppression of the scream--to advocate for a history of art that gives voice to those victims of brutality whom scholars have preferred, in the past, to suppress below the register of audibility.